Parent and Child Search Option

dpgetman

I have noticed that in the Advanced Search box the Include parent and child of matching items check box is somewhat irrelevant: Whether or not it is checked, it seems, all of the child and parent items related to the item that actually does contain the searched for term come up in the list. The titles of the related items are grey while the titles of the items with the searched for items in them are black. This is a problem in that it makes it impossible to create a batch tag for your search matches without also tagging every related item. Any advice on how to get around this would be helpful.

dstillman

The checkbox is quite useful for some things, but not for what you want. There's no way currently to not display (in gray) non-matching items. The visibility of non-matching items could perhaps be a persistent setting on the saved search itself, accessible from its context menu.

dpgetman

Is it possible, then, to perform a search for a word in the text of your notes and then take all the actual matches and assign a tag to them?

dstillman

No, if by "actual matches" you mean "all the matches that show up in the list in any color". In other words, you can't use Select All for this. The gray items are non-matching items and won't show up, for example, in reports generated from the search, but there's currently no way to hide them from the items list, so you'd have to select the items you want to tag manually.

erazlogo

@dan - could we create ticket to add a "select all matching items" option on right-click of the saved search? that would allow users to tag all found items at once without having to select them manually

dstillman

That's a possibility, but it might be too specific to this problem, whereas there are a number of reasons you might want the ability to simply hide non-matching items from the list. Among other things it'd let you have project-specific notes (using tags) that didn't show up when you were working on other projects.

That's also how the quicksearch worked in early betas of Zotero before we made child items always show up under their parents (since hiding non-matching parents is a bit confusing).

erazlogo

Yeah except the point of this discussion is to display matching notes independently of sources which was never an option in Zotero. Hiding non-matching items would be great if you could then also hide nonmatching parents and display only matching notes.

jodler

I think this issue came up in several discussions and a lot of people would really like to have the option "hide non-matching items". maybe as an addition to the already existing option in the "Edit Saved Search" dialog. In this case Zotero would only hide non-matching items when the user requested it for a specific search.

jodler

for related discussions see for example http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/2739/viewing-notes-without-sources/#Item_4

dstillman

Yeah except the point of this discussion is to display notes independently of sources which was never an option in Zotero.

Well technically that was the point of the other discussion, no?

Hiding non-matching items would be great if you could then also hide nonmatching parents and display only matching notes.

I suggested on that other thread that there be a "Only include child items of matching items" option on searches. Together, that option (to narrow your matches without using the chained saved search hack I describe there) and this option (to choose whether non-matching items are displayed) would give you a display of notes listed independently of their parent items. It wouldn't address logical sorting, but that's a separate (and much more complicated) issue.

erazlogo

I suggested on that other thread that there be a "Only include child items of matching items" option on searches. Together that option (to narrow your matches without using the chained saved search hack I describe there) and this option (to narrow which items were displayed) would give you a display of notes listed independently of their parent items.

Ah, ok, that would work great, many thanks! I just thought you were talking about hiding notes and displaying the parents only given that you said this:

hiding non-matching parents is a bit confusing

dstillman

Oh, no, I just meant that that's the reason we changed the default behavior. As long as hiding non-matching items (which might very well be parents) is an option that has to be explicitly turned on, I have no problem with bringing that behavior back.

dpgetman

This problem is handled quite straight forwardly in Scribe: in the advanced search box you have a set of check boxes that serve to limit the search to particular item types, including source, note, match, tagged, untagged, and a number of others.

Is there some reason why having a similar set of controls as to the search output could not be implemented in the Zotero advanced search box? Perhaps that way one could eliminate even as-of-yet unseen birds with one stone.

erazlogo

Tickets added for hide non-matching items and only include child items of matching items options in advanced search.

dpgetman

erazlogo
Now that the ticket is added, when can we expect this sort of feature to be available?

erazlogo

Now that the ticket is added, when can we expect this sort of feature to be available?

Not sure--probably after synchronization and hierarchical item types are implemented.

dpgetman

erazlogo

Not sure--probably after synchronization and hierarchical item types are implemented.

Well, we've had three updates since this discussion ended: am I right in thinking that the tickets meant to resolve the parent child viewing issue have not yet been incorporated? If not, apart from their place in line behind synchronization, is there any indication of any time frame for their inclusion?

erazlogo

am I right in thinking that the tickets meant to resolve the parent child viewing issue have not yet been incorporated?

Yes.

If not, apart from their place in line behind synchronization, is there any indication of any time frame for their inclusion?

No.

tobinje

I hope a fix that makes it easier to view and sort notes (detached from their parent sources) will become a higher priority. It seems to me that the ability to sort notes in chronological order -- regardless of what sources the notes come from -- is fundamental to the job of many historians as they go about the writing process. I've read the instructions for generating reports containing only notes. But from what I can tell, it remains impossible to sort notes from diverse sources into simple chronological order. In other words, Zotero cannot sort notes as well as I could if I were using nothing more than a stack of index cards -- which I would happily do if I weren't trying to manage several thousand items. I'm grateful for Zotero's many wonderful strengths, but this strikes me as a critical weakness. Have I simply missed something?

erazlogo

What do you mean by "chronological order"?

To sort notes in reports by "date added," add "?sort=dateAdded" in the end of the report url ("extensions.zotero.report.combineChildItems" should be set to "false").

That said, it would be great to get the above tickets done.

tobinje

I'm referring to notes about events that occur over time, one after another. Say I'm writing an account of George Washington's activities in 1776. Using Source A, I write a note about what Washington did on January 1. Then, using Source B, I take a note about what he did on January 4. Then, using many more sources, I add several hundred more notes about what he did on other days in 1776. At the end, I want to be able to sort all those notes into chronological order -- all notes dealing with January 1, then all notes dealing with January 2, and so on -- without having the sources dictate the order in which the notes appear.

erazlogo

You can start each note with a date--for example, start note about January 1, 1776 with "17760101"--and then sort by note. Or you can use "document" item type to create timelines, but then you might have to link notes as "related items" to the "document" entries, which is twice the work.

tobinje

Yes, my notes all begin with dates as you suggest, in the format "1776 01 01." But I'm afraid I don't know what you mean by "...then sort by note." How do I do that, and will it put the notes in date order?

erazlogo

Follow these instructions carefully and your report will display notes independently from sources and sorted by the dates that you put in the beginning of each note:

http://www.zotero.org/documentation/reports#using_reports_to_organize_your_notes

dstillman

As of the latest 1.0 dev build, doing a Select All in the items list in search results mode will select only the matching (i.e., black, not gray) items.

This should address the original request on this thread (and others), and it addresses part (but not all) of the rationale behind the "hide non-matching items" ticket. The new behavior does prevent a true Select All, but that can easily be done manually with a few more clicks or, for saved searches, by using "Include parent and child items of matching items". If people find the lack of a true Select All problematic, we can consider other options, but this new behavior is probably what people want the majority of the time and should generally make search results more useful.

Barring further refinements, this change will be included in 1.0.8 and the next 1.5 release.